


The Ignominious Demise of Dr. Pilchard, 4th Period Redux

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Series: life! life! eternity! [6]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Background Relationships, Gen, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 02:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30132321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: “Marius,” he says, lightly, “Don’t take this the wrong way, or anything, but I would rather literally decapitate you than talk to you about that.”Ivy asks, “is there a right way to take that,” and her voice is dreamy enough that Raphaella is pretty sure there’s no question mark at the end of it.
Relationships: Drumbot Brian & Raphaella la Cognizi, Ivy Alexandria & Raphaella la Cognizi, Raphaella la Cognizi & Marius von Raum
Series: life! life! eternity! [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2153655
Comments: 11
Kudos: 28





	The Ignominious Demise of Dr. Pilchard, 4th Period Redux

Raphaella knows that documentation and structure are necessary to turn an inquiry into an _experiment_ , as it were, but she does like to approach every aspect of her life with the spirit of scientific curiosity, and that tendency has served her well. For one thing, she thinks her serious-mindedness is the only reason she gets advanced into Dr. Pilchard’s two-year honors physics program as a sophomore. For another, it’s why she’s the best equipped to wreak her righteous wrath upon Dr. Pilchard when it becomes necessary to do so, although, of course, it’s Brian, in the end, who pulls the trigger.

…

Raphaella likes Brian — she has since she met him, and she still does freshman year, when Marius is all obsessed with this group of morbid, oddball sophomores, and is determined that he and Raphaella are going to infiltrate them. Marius describes Brian as “One of the more boring ones,” and “trying to let the hats do the heavy lifting in terms of establishing his personality,” which, Marius says, is a flawed strategy because hats aren’t allowed in class, and who cares what you look like outside of school?

“People who have places to go and people to hang out with after school, probably,” Raphaella says, hanging sideways and half-upside-down off Marius’s bed in the late afternoon sunshine. Brian has a nice smile, Raphaella thinks, even if you’d never know it just from seeing him around in school.

Marius hmmms. “Guess we’d better get to know them well enough that we have somewhere to go, too,” he says. “Maybe Brian’s secretly the cool one, he’s just too cool to bother being cool during school.”

This, probably, is the moment when Raphaella should mention that she knows Brian from outside of school, and that yes, she does think he seems cool. Saying so feels like it would be giving something away, though, even to Marius, who is the best friend she’s got, so instead she reaches out and sets his hands out in front of him, about a foot apart, and winds a shoelace she found in her pocket, knotted into a loop, over his fingers so he can set up cat’s cradle.

…

The problem, in the end, is that Dr. Pilchard isn’t a very good teacher.

“I thought you were excited about this class,” Ivy says, the third class period in a row when Raphaella has slipped out the back of the classroom, completely unnoticed, and padded down the hall to the library to lean up against the desk and pester Ivy at her library aide shift.

“I _was_ ,” Raphaella says, allowing herself to pout a little.

“Then why am I seeing more of you than your actual classmates are?”

This, finally, is the opening Raphaella has been waiting for. “They _like_ that it’s a blow-off class.”

It can be hard to tell what Ivy will and won’t care about, but Raphaella has this idea that Ivy might actually be the best audience for this particular complaint, since she doesn’t have a lot of time for the rebel-without-a-cause attitude Jonny and Ashes have so much fun putting on. “It’s supposed to be an advanced class, but he’s barely pushing us straight through a textbook, and it’s not even a good textbook!” If Raphaella knows Ivy at all, this will be the most damning thing she could say.

Ivy doesn’t look impressed, though, just shifts sideways at the counter to start scanning through a pile of returns and says, “I don’t know what you expected, everyone knows the science department’s stoned half the time, and that Pilchard’s class specifically exists to fluff up lacrosse players’ transcripts.”

“ _I_ didn’t know that,” Raphaella blurts before she can stop herself. She knew about the science department, obviously — she’s smelled the science hallway when they’re having a staff meeting after school — but how is she supposed to know what lacrosse players do and do not do? “I’ve been talking about the class since last year, you could at least have warned me.”

Ivy looks up, at that, but it’s one of those looks where her eyes are trained on Raphaella, but her focus might as well be on another planet. She says, “You were enjoying anticipating it so much,”

At that, she trails off. Raphaella isn’t quite as good at filling in the blanks for Ivy as she is for Marius, but when Ivy doesn’t pick the sentence back up after a moment, she tries, “Did you not think I would believe you?” If that’s the case, Raphaella is afraid she’s going to have to say something unsubtle and ungraceful to set the record straight, something about how she always trusts Ivy, but Ivy just shakes her head dreamily.

“No, you were just enjoying living inside the possibility of the idea that the class would be exactly what you wanted. Why would I take that away sooner than the world did?”

…

The other notable thing about junior year — besides Nastya being gone, and the vindication of Raphaella’s vendetta against a respected member of the faculty coming to light, and all of Raphaella’s friends besides Marius being seniors making this year her _last chance_ with them — is that this uptight hall monitor joins the drama club, and Marius decides that he’s in love.

“We’re like Romeo and Juliet,” he says, far too delightedly for someone who knows all the implications of that story inside and out. “Except instead of Montagues and Capulets, it’s the school traffic police and, um—” 

Marius pauses and Raphaella can practically see his brain working, trying to come up with a suitably dramatic and opposite-of-a-hall-monitor description for them and their friends. When he doesn’t find it right away, she supplies, “Us?” She knows the effect he’s going for, she doesn’t need a fully polished performance.

“Yeah,” he agrees, “Us.”

Unfortunately for Marius, Lyfassir Edda doesn’t seem to have been struck with the same Shakespearean bolt of love at first sight, and this eventually means that junior year ends up calling for some _schemes_. One of the earliest ones, serenading Lyf in front of the entire drama club, is one that Marius is confident enough in that none of the rest of them are even roped into it, which means they really only hear about it after the fact, over lunch the next day.

“The song turned out really well, though,” Marius concludes, at the end of the sorry tale. “Everyone said so, they all clapped when I got to the end and asked Lyf to homecoming. And who wouldn’t want that?”

Jonny snorts. “Oh, for my money, maybe …just about anyone?”

Marius laughs like the joke there isn’t on him, shedding disappointment as fast as it had come over him, and teases back, “No big romantic gestures for you, Jonny? Sucks to be Tim, I guess.”

That—is pretty bold of Marius, actually. Not that it’s a surprise, Marius cheerfully trampling over an unspoken boundary for the sake of making a joke. Only, Raphaella had been pretty sure they still weren’t talking about the Jonny-and-Tim thing, and the jerky way Jonny glances around them, like he’s making sure no one outside of their little group is listening, or maybe like he’s making sure Tim still isn’t in the vicinity confirms that he had thought they weren’t talking about it, too.

When Jonny turns back to Marius, it’s slow and theatrical enough that Raphaella can tell he’s already regained some of his cool about the whole thing. “Marius,” he says, lightly, “Don’t take this the wrong way, or anything, but I would rather literally decapitate you than talk to you about that.”

Ivy asks, “is there a right way to take that,” and her voice is dreamy enough that Raphaella is pretty sure there’s no question mark at the end of it.

Jonny answers it anyway, though, flopping back onto the grass and saying, “Yes, and that’s as it was intended: sincerely.”

…

Brian says no, eventually, that time that Raphaella asks him to go to a dance with her. He says yes at first, and then the next day after school he walks her home and walks back his acceptance at the same time, and Raphaella doesn’t _mind_ — she’s pleased that she asked, and the fact that he’s said no feels like a useful bit of closure.

She goes to the dance with the Toy Soldier, instead. It shows up in a bowtie and a tailcoat looking like a butler from a period murder mystery, which is a good enough theme that Raphaella has to run upstairs and throw on about five more pieces of jewelry so she can match it as the charming but suspicious wealthy widow at the house party which is cruelly interrupted when someone finds a body in the library.

When Raphaella asks the Toy Soldier if it wants to go with her, she clarifies, “Just as friends,” and it grins brilliantly and says “I would really love to go as friends,” and Raphaella decides that this will probably end up being more fun than any awkward date would be, anyway. They get their picture taken together, and they dance wildly enough that a space clears around them as people move to avoid their flailing, off-beat limbs, and then when they’re tired they grab snacks and go to sit up on the track running around the upper level of the gym so they can look down on the dance spread out below their dangling feet.

It’s a good night, and Raphaella hardly even wonders what the alternate universe version of it would have been, if Brian had said yes.

…

After she talks to Ivy, Raphaella marches back to Pilchard’s class with a new sense of resolve. Ivy is right, she _has_ spent the entire summer looking forward to this class. Giving up on it now, just because it has turned out to be terrible, feels like a waste of all that hope and positive feeling. She’s going to get back to class, and she is going to listen to Pilchard’s terrible, droning voice, and she’s going to note down his boring, uninspired examples, and she is going to wring as much knowledge as she can out of the experience.

She gets back to the room, and Pilchard is sitting behind the desk reading a magazine. “What did I miss?” Raphaella asks Ashes, who is idly sketching out an inferno on the back of their binder. Really, the fact that Ashes is in this class ought to have been Raphaella’s first clue that the course wasn’t going to be what she wanted it to be. Ashes has been banned from all other lab sciences since that fire in the chem lab. The fact that they’re welcome here probably ought to have felt like a bad sign from the first moment Raphaella heard it.

Ashes shrugs, and gestures to a print-out full of true-false questions, which they haven’t so much as written their name across the top of. “Open book pop-quiz. We’ve got till the end of the period to find the answers in the textbook.” When Raphaella raises an eyebrow, Ashes goes on, “We’re allowed to work in groups.”

All of these things, Raphaella thinks, are basically fine in their own right, it’s just the combination of them, and the lack of any other things to balance them out, that makes the course feel so useless.

…

Raphaella likes to lie out under the grow-light shining down on her big brother’s pot plants in the basement and feel herself expand from the inside out from the glow.

Plants are pretty amazing, even the ones you don’t smoke. Raphaella likes to test cuttings to see which ones will root, and she’s been surprised a hundred times over by how many of them manage it. A stretch of branch, a stem — even a leaf, sometimes, and they just know how to be all the other parts of a whole new plant, if they get the right time, space, and conditions to grow.

The pot plants in the basement have the right conditions to grow even though they never see real sunshine, which is its own kind of magic, Raphaella thinks. There’s a power in being a small human person, so limited, but still being able to set up a light source for these basement plants which replaces the sun. She’s read a bit about hydroponics, and that sounds even better still. How good is human understanding, how many parts of natural reality can be stripped away and replaced by man-made approximations and still grow tall and strong and fruitful?

Raphaella doesn’t smoke much anymore, though.

…

“This year’s a bust,” Raphaella tells Ivy, leaning confidingly over the edge of the library desk, “But if I could get him gone by next year, then we might actually learn something.”

Ivy’s at the library computer, and though she waved when Raphaella came in, she hasn’t looked over at her. She continues to appear not to have seen Raphaella at all as she offers, “Or you could just, I don’t know, not take the class next year.”

“I don’t want to look like I dropped it because I couldn’t do it,” Raphaella says. She has actually thought this through, she’s not plotting her revenge for no reason, here.

Ivy nods, eyes still trained on the screen, and says, “Well, I suppose you could get him fired.”

It’s an appealing thought, but Raphaella knows better than to let it take hold too hard in her mind. “You know no one ever gets fired, they just get transferred somewhere else in the district, like the experimental school—”

And, well, that’s a thought.

The experimental school on the outskirts of town uses non-traditional teaching methods, has a low student-to-teacher ratio, and generally sounds great on paper. It’s also a hot mess of a place Raphaella wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy, but Dr. Pilchard is worse than an enemy, he’s a _disappointment_.

…

The thing is, Raphaella has this feeling that Lyf actually does like Marius. “Me too,” Marius agrees explosively. “I don’t know what the problem is!”

“Yeah,” Raphaella muses, thinking it through, “I’d say maybe it’s a straight thing only—”

“Only.” Marius agrees, sighing theatrically. _Only_ aside from being a hall monitor, Lyf is also the president of the Gay-Straight Alliance.

“And he actually joined drama club, even knowing that you’re in every production—”

“—Even knowing that I run that club,” Marius agrees.

“And he, like, looks at you sometimes—” Raphaella is under the impression that staring is often an expression of romantic interest, although she thinks it could also be a sign of an intensely focused dislike. They’re examining the evidence for Marius’s hypothesis now, though, so she doesn’t bring this alternate interpretation up yet.

“And that time we read a scene together,” Marius muses, and Raphaella hasn’t actually heard this story, it sounds important, “We were really _good_.”

Marius says it like that means something, but Raphaella doesn’t quite know what.

“We had chemistry!” Marius explains to her blank expression. “Dramatic spark! Zing!”

“Well, he did join the drama club on purpose,” Raphaella reminds him. She’s a little doubtful of the relevance of this piece of evidence.

“Yeah, but he’s not usually very good,” Marius explains dreamily. “This time was special.”

That’s enough evidence that Raphaella thinks they really ought to be taking notes on all of this. She goes to dig in her bag for a notebook, and the sound of the rustling almost covers the sound of footsteps heading their way.

Handily enough, when Raphaella emerges triumphant with a pen and paper, it’s Lyfassir Edda himself looming over where they’re sitting on the floor, leaned up against the side-door to the auditorium. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” Lyf asks, a little pissily, Raphaella thinks.

“Why did you join the drama club?” she asks him brightly, pen poised over paper.

“I, uh—I wanted to expand my horizons,” he explains, a little stiltedly. “You really can’t be here without a hall pass, you know.”

“Expand your horizons how?” Raphaella asks, noting down his answer. It sounds like bullshit, mostly, but the fact of talking bullshit instead of giving a straight answer can be its own kind of answer in itself. “We have a pass,” she explains, when he doesn’t look like he’s going to answer her. She flashes a big spoon that looks a lot like one of the ones one of the art teachers uses as her hall pass so she doesn’t have to keep writing new ones.

“Well, I — I’m not very confident in social situations,” Lyf explains, and that sounds a little more real. Raphaella grins encouragingly. “I thought practicing performance, and putting myself in a new situation — I thought it would help. Plus, colleges like a range of kinds of extracurriculars.”

“Do they?” Raphaella isn’t really interested in that, but the rote way he repeats it is kind of intriguing.

“Well, yeah, that’s what all the books say. Look, even with a pass, you can’t just hang out here in the hallway. If you’re done with whatever errand you’re on, you have to go back to class or I’ll need to write you up.” At that point, Lyf glances Marius’s way for maybe the first time over the course of this little interaction. It’s not a comfortable look.

“Right,” Marius agrees, “I completely understand!” he makes no move to stand.

After waiting a moment, Lyf asks, “Are you going to go?”

“Nah,” Marius says, “You said you’d write us up!”

Lyf goes red, at that, and Raphaella stares at him harder. She’s known who he is for years, but she’s never looked too closely at his face, and there’s something _familiar_ there, something—

“I, uh. If I write you up, you get a detention.”

—something weirdly familiar about that face, though the context is all wrong.

“Wouldn’t be the first time!” Marius offers with a grin. “Would you be the detention-monitor, too? Since you’re the one who’s writing me up?”

The words _writing me up_ have probably not sounded this suggestive in this context for years, Raphaella thinks.

“No, a different teacher takes a turn holding non-class-specific detentions every week,” Lyf says, face still red.

“Shame! Still, the show must go on, I guess,” Marius says, holding his arms out like he thinks he’s going to get handcuffed. Lyf backs away.

“I’m on the second floor next, but somebody else will be by to check this corridor in the next half hour,” Lyf says, “And they _will_ write you up if you’re still here.” Then he turns around and run-walks away towards the stairs.

By Raphaella’s side, Marius leans back against the door with a satisfied smile on his face. “Yeah, he likes me.”

Raphaella frowns down at her notes. “Probably, yeah. Doesn’t he look a bit like Jonny?”

…

Raphaella’s father can be induced to make one call to the school, probably, protesting the lack of academic rigor in his daughter’s supposedly advanced class, but he hasn’t got the staying power to turn it into a campaign. 

“Oh, I can handle that part,” the Toy Soldier offers. “Jessica’s mother cares a lot about academics.” Gloriously true to form, no one knows what to do with that, so Raphaella exchanges a look with Ivy and then moves on, confident that TS will have anything it takes on well in hand.

Then there’s Ashes, and the fact that lab fires aren’t a plausible mishap in this particular course, but that just means they have to be a little extra creative in causing trouble. Ashes isn’t entirely on board with the “revenge” side of this revenge scheme since they do actually like that the class is a blow-off course, but they _do_ like mayhem, and they do, Raphaella thinks, mostly like her. They call her Raph and eat the pickles Raphaella pulls out of her sandwiches and mostly didn’t even mind her when she and Marius first started hanging around the group as freshmen.

But the piece de resistance is Brian, who takes to hanging around the room after class, ostensibly helping Dr. P clean up after class, although what there can possibly be to clean is beyond Raphaella’s understanding, and asking calm, probing questions about educational theory that throw Dr. P’s methods into a generously bohemian and experimental (rather than, as Raphaella would describe it, lazy and useless) light. The groundwork, Raphaella thinks, is laid. By the time Raphaella writes out the script for her father’s call to complain to the principal about the class, Dr. Pilchard is more than ready to be voluntold to transfer to the experimental school.

…

Raphaella can pretty much always tell, when she’s looking at people Tam brings home, whether they’re friends or customers. Not that some of them aren’t both — the line is definitely more than a little blurry. This guy, though, there’s no question. He’s younger than Tam by enough years to be obvious, and dressed weird in a way that’s more theatrical than grungy — no way any of Tam’s crowd would drop the money that fairly high-end-looking top hat must have cost on a statement piece.

He’s young, and he’s never been there before, and there’s some awkwardness in his phrasing as he buys a dime bag, like he’s been told the language to use but it doesn’t feel quite comfortable in his mouth yet, and Raphaella’s eyes are stuck on him like magnets. She’s perched at the top of the basement stairs, mostly out of sight and in the shadows, and no one ever really notices her when she’s got herself perched there in that liminal space, but this guy must feel the magnet-pull, too, because as he’s stowing his purchase in his jacket pocket, he looks up and meets her gaze.

Tam notices the look, follows it, and laughs. “It’s alright, man, that’s just my sister, she’s chill.”

“Is that right?” tall, blondish, and awkward asks. “Are you chill?”

Raphaella laughs a little despite herself. “No more than is proportional in a human, but I’m not going to call the cops on you. Or your parents.”

“Good enough,” the guy says, and then, “I don’t think I’ve seen you around, are you a freshman?”

For no real reason at all, Raphaella is seized with the completely irrational urge to lie and agree, but she knows Tam would call her on it. Instead, she says, “No, but next year,” and feels oddly warmed when the guy says, “Cool, maybe I’ll see you around.” He smiles, and it’s as warm as the grow lights that sustain the plants which are the reason why he’s here, and he says, “My name’s Brian.”


End file.
